girlgeniusfandomcom-20200214-history
Forum:My mad plans
It's hard for me to tell sometimes when there's consensus on something and when there's not, so rather than polling on each individual item, I thought I'd just post a list of "Things I will eventually do if no one stops me or gets to it first". * Change the color scheme of the site so that it has more of a gaslamp fantasy feel * Update/cleanup the layout of the main page to reflect Wikia changes * Change one or more items on the main page (see Talk:Main Page) * Give the Forums thematic names (see Forum:Renaming Proposals) * Move speculative discussion / pertinent info on talk pages to mad pages (talk pages should not be used as forums) I'll add more to this list as I think of things. I should note, though, that I really am not a web design or graphics person. I'd really prefer if someone with more experience made cosmetic changes. --mnenyver 23:15, 24 November 2008 (UTC) : I added a similar comment on the forum renaming page, but please don't get too cute with the naming. We want to encourage participants, not drive them away by putting everything in code. Let's try to keep this Wiki accessible to people who only speak English and don't know the "in jokes". Argadi 00:42, 25 November 2008 (UTC) : I have finally made a first attempt at creating the infrastructure for decorative text boxes of the type you may be thinking of. So far, however, I have not sufficiently mastered the wiki markup language and tables to have something that works. My incomplete effort is at Template:Decorative Box Begin. --Quadibloc 14:04, 8 December 2008 (UTC) :: I have the code working now. Visit Template:Decorative Box Begin which has an almost identical companion Template:Decorative Box End and Template:Decorative Box 2 Begin and again Template:Decorative Box 2 End to see my results. :: The four images in the corner for each one will need to be improved, though, to be satisfactory for the site, and then the color and width of the four (or two in the case of the second box) cells, each with one color (because I couldn't get background images to work) that make up the edges of the box would need to be modified to correspond. :: The idea (which I hope is clear from what is there) is that box style one would be leather held by a decorative, perhaps filigreed in the corners a little bit, gold border, and box style 2 is a gold plaque held on by screws in the corners. --Quadibloc 02:11, 9 December 2008 (UTC) ::: I now have an illustration of how what I have created might look if liberally used at User:Quadibloc/AltMain so that the appropriateness of such steps can be assessed, as well as how they look like on different browsers. --Quadibloc 06:16, 10 December 2008 (UTC) To my mind, those first three are non-controversial and the last would have been if Argadi had not spoken up. Incidentally, my mad plans would involve starting a number of Mad: namespace pages that, essentially, take P.R.O.I. and turn it inside-out. A page on The Anubis Gates, on Norse mythology, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc. ⚙Zarchne 01:20, 25 November 2008 (UTC) :I’ve split off most of the main page text into separate templates; this should make it easier to edit (and lower the risk of accidentally destroying the table structure). Ordinary 02:09, 27 November 2008 (UTC) As you are aware, I recently bungled an attempt to move the Zola "Heterodyne" page. I did change its sort order. It occurs to me that there is a larger issue here. Putting each character under the name that character is given in any cast list certainly has the virtue of being official and unambiguous. As more and more characters are added to the saga, though, people won't have the option of scanning the entire list of characters to find a character they're looking for. Zola - the Pink Heterodyne, the False Heterodyne - is an extreme case, because someone who has seen the only name given to her, Zola, isn't likely to look for her under "H". Dr. Dimitri is another case - because one has to go to the cast liet to know he is also Dr. Vapnoople. Or Boris. In those cases, there's a need to have _two_ entries on the Characters category page. I'm not sure if there's a technical way to do this (i.e. putting category entries on the redirect pages - but that wouldn't work). :: Actually, it does work. See Category:Antidisambiguation, which is for something like “shortest unambiguous version of name”. AFAIK, (similar to Mad:) no one likes the existence of this category except me. As far as I am concerned, placing REDIRECT pages in categories to make them easier to find, rather than having to go through the trouble of searching, is a good idea. But few others have agreed, and it's not of high importance to me, so we haven't done it... much.⚙Zarchne 07:00, 7 December 2008 (UTC) ::: Well, I do see that the Category:Antidisambiguation item on the redirect page didn't stop it from being a redirect page. But it didn't cause Boris to show up under B on the Characters page either, which is what people will eventually need when the number of characters becomes really large. (I don't think new people will usually use the Antidisambiguation page to find things.) I do have some plans for Mad, by the way, to make it easier to use that namespace when people do become interested. --Quadibloc 07:16, 7 December 2008 (UTC) :::: Well, no, of course putting Boris into Antidisambiguation (by making a category link in the former) is not going to make it show up in Characters; you have to put a category link for Characters into Boris for that to happen. If you do, it will. But as I recall, when I did it people didn't like it, so I backed off.⚙Zarchne 08:16, 7 December 2008 (UTC) ::::: If people don't like it, then I won't do it either. I think we will need to do it when there are more characters; the issue isn't pressing now, but it seems to me like an issue worth raising for discussion before we reach that point. --Quadibloc 14:16, 7 December 2008 (UTC) What I'd like to do is to somehow add extra links so that where there are names that people would be likely to search for a character under, instead of the principal one, there would be an alternate link at a different position in the list available for that purpose. --Quadibloc 01:15, 6 December 2008 (UTC) :I agree there could be an issue, but I think when this was first discussed we decided on having just one entry per character in the category. Don't forget that users can also search and we do make use of redirect pages. At any rate, we should probably move this discussion to its own topic. --mnenyver 03:11, 6 December 2008 (UTC)